Paramount allegedly uses Enron accounting to rule box office

According to some estimates, the numbers for the U.S. box office take for the Jun 28, 2014 debut of Transformers: Age of Extinction seems high, which has several media outlets calling Paramount out on its reporting. Paramount puts the figure for this epically bad film at just over $100 million. Other companies are calling it a lie. Paramount may have decide to take a page out of the Enron playbook and report the film on its Hypothetical Future Value. If Paramount has over reported earnings for the weekend, it could under report the earnings during the week making the numbers correct by the end of the second weekend. The alleged prevarication allows Paramount to have more headlines that are cleaner - $100 million domestic and $302 million international. It also allows them to grab headlines of the dirty variety, i.e. “Paramount allegedly uses Enron accounting technique to rule box office”. Either way it keeps the terrible Transformers movie in the spotlight and ensures that more people will see it over the holiday weekend. Whatever the motivation is, the movie goer can only hope that it is the truth and that the other companies got it wrong. If lying becomes the norm, we could see middling successful movies attempt to guess the box office for the entire run of the film and then using that number for the first weekend release numbers. Aside from the immorality of lying, the FCC did rule that Enron’s HFV accounting practice was illegal (After Enron caused rolling blackouts in California, went bankrupt and took other companies with it). Box office numbers shouldn’t really matter, but in order for people to be able to trust a company, it needs to be accurate in what it reports. Otherwise, consumers and reporters should start looking into the other things that Paramount could be lying about. This is just one more example of why people and the government should not allow companies to police themselves. For those who are really concerned about it, there are other films out to see that are much better than the poorly written tripe that the Transformers 4 movie is. Earth to Echo is actually a better Transformers movie than Age of ExSTINKtion, or just pick any other movie except maybe Tammy and you should be happier with it than with the Michael Bay bomb.